A Brief Snapshot
by SeverusSingerOwnsACat
Summary: "One of the downfalls of being so perceptive is seeing things that you'd rather be unaware of." A brief snapshot of Luna's life: emotions unexplained, events not occurring, thoughts unvoiced. Oneshot. One sided Luna/Hermione.


A Brief Snapshot

Summary:

_One of the downfalls of being so perceptive is seeing things that you'd rather be unaware of_.

A brief snapshot of Luna's life: emotions unexplained, events not occurring, thoughts unvoiced. Oneshot.

A/N:

I'm going to apologise in advance for the sort of cruel portrayal of Neville in this one-shot. If you're a Neville fan, I'm sorry. I do love him, but this is one way I can interpret his character, and he was kind of based on someone I know. Also, portraying him this way was essential for the fic.

Okay. I hope you enjoy reading this.

* * *

It was impossible to find a still snapshot at Hogwarts; impossible to catch a frozen frame in time, because something was always happening. There were always people moving – jogging to catch up with friends; first years scurrying along, still unsure how to bend the rules; older students sauntering to lessons; teachers ushering the dawdlers along – and there was always so much _noise_.

There was so much noise that the sound became the very air itself; it filled every corner, rumbled up every staircase, pressed into every wall. During lessons, when the corridors were empty, everything – the noise, the motion – seemed to be on pause. But it was an unnatural, unnerving sort of pause, leaving the corridors filled to the brim with a silence so dense that anyone walking through it felt like an intruder as their usually quiet footfalls became loud and echoey.

At night time, when a velvet sheet of purple and black descended over the sky, turning the castle and grounds to silhouettes, the silence was different. At night, things hadn't stopped; nothing had been paused. At night, it was as though the castle breathed a sigh of relief and a peaceful, calm silence blossomed.

Except it wasn't silent, not really, Luna Lovegood observed from where she sat, knees curled up, on the window-seat beside the half-open window in the Ravenclaw Girl's Dorm.

It wasn't silent; everything was breathing. Everything around the castle was taking the opportunity to live and relax before the students and staff trampled all over it again the next day. The trees of the Forbidden Forest shared their breezy, raspy song; the Black Lake welcomed the moonlight on it's surface like an old friend; and the castle itself seemed to become sentient, watching over the darkened grounds.

Luna felt privileged to be sitting with the castle, watching along with it. She often did this when she had something to think over, so she'd been doing it a lot lately.

She'd never had much difficulty with feelings before; never found it so difficult to explain in words how she felt. But she was fifteen now, a half-grown woman drifting between the romantic, peaceful notions of her childhood and the strange, conflicted ideas of the world that she'd stumbled in to.

If someone else had come to her asking advice on the same situation – "_He loves me more than I love him, because I love someone else but I don't want to hurt him_" – she knew that she would have found it easy to give them a solution:

"_Find yourself a happy medium_," she would have said. "_Don't be cruel, just tell him the truth. Then, you can reach a place where you are both able to be, before moving on. It will hurt, but it's better than anxiety, doubt and lies._"

_Anxiety, doubt and lies_.

Three things that her Dad had taught her to avoid. He had taught her not to dwell on anxiety, because whatever happens, some good will come out of it. He had taught her not to doubt herself, to follow her heart and use her head to understand the people around her. And he had taught her, above all, not to lie. He had taught her that the truth is all there is; that creating falsehoods and deceptions would only lead to the suffocation of herself and others.

Luna closed her eyes and leant her head out of the window so that the cool wind could cleanse her skin and lift her hair off her face.

"Mum," she whispered, as she often did when she was alone with the wind. "Mum, does it hurt very much to fall trying to reach for what you need?"

There was no obvious, spoken answer, but the words came clearly in Luna's head, in a memory of her mother's melodic voice: "Yes, darling, but it hurts more to settle for something you don't want when your bones are still broken from the fall."

* * *

"...no solid evidence, at all!"

"There's no solid evidence that they don't exist."

"Oh, that's just...! That's just ri_dic_ulous! If you go by that rule, you could say _any_thing exist! You could say... say: oh, look, a... a Flibber-di-jibber!"

Luna followed Hermione's pointing finger and said, "Actually, that's a Blibbering Humdinger. But I'm glad to see that you're trying."

Hermione gave an exasperated sigh, raised a palm to her forehead and leant back against the wall, muttering, "Why do I bother? _Why _do I bother?"

They were standing in the small, circular room beneath the trapdoor to Professor Trelawney's classroom. Hermione was by the window, the sun occasionally catching the edges of her curly brown hair and her robes, throwing pale shadows across the floor.

Luna was sitting cross-legged on the floor, in the rectangle of honey-light cast by the sun through the large window. Whenever a shadow spread from Hermione, it landed over Luna.

Luna tucked a strand of white-blonde hair behind her ear, her fingers brushing against the earring made of a dirigible plum. She looked up at Hermione, her expression a careful, day-dreamy neutral. She let her eyes take in the whirlwind, dark brown curls and the large, shining, copper-coloured eyes. She memorised the pale-but-slightly-tanned complexion and the lips, which, at that moment, Hermione was running the nail of her index finger over. It was something Luna had noticed her doing when she was thinking; it was a repetitive, small, back and forth action on the right side of her bottom lip. Luna wondered where she'd picked it up.

She never wondered like that about-

"Neville!" Hermione called, finished the thought for her.

Luna looked up and saw the gangly boy with the slightly-too-neat chestnut hair climbing carefully down the ladder out of Trelawney's classroom.

"Hello, Hermione," he said, when he reached the floor.

Then he spotted Luna, who was picking at the lace of her canvas pumps.

"Hey, Luna," he said in a softer voice.

She looked up at him and forced her lips into a smile. She knew she had no justifiable reason to, but she hated him.

"Hi, Neville," she said, letting her eyes drift away to avoid his.

Other students descended the step ladder down to the sunlit floor, most of them not quite as cautious and slow as Neville. Luna watched them, recognising all their faces and recalling most of their names, though they weren't in her year group or her house, and she had never had a conversation with any of them.

A pair of damaged, slightly oversized shoes appeared at the top of the ladder, and Luna noticed Hermione's subconscious step forward.

_One of the downfalls of being so perceptive _– her Dad had once told her – _is seeing things that you'd rather be unaware of_.

_But the whole world is beautiful, Daddy_, a six year old Luna had replied. _I want to see everything!_

Her Dad had smiled and tugged on her pigtail affectionately; she had been so young, she hadn't understood the sadness in that gesture.

The pair of oversized shoes had reached the floor now; they were on the feet of Ron Weasley, who was shortly joined by Harry. They both had a slow, heavy look about them, as though they'd been prematurely woken from a nap.

"'Ello, 'Ermione," Ron said, rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. "Bored of Arithmancy yet?"

"No, I am not!" Hermione replied. Her words sounded affronted, but her face said otherwise: she was smiling in a way normally only induced by a well-cast Cheering Charm as she swatted Ron's arm with a heavy book she'd been holding.

Luna vainly hoped that Nargles or Wrackspurts had been messing with Hermione's head, but her eyes and years of observing had taught her otherwise. The world and the people in it didn't seem as beautiful to Luna as they had when she was a six year old child; a feeling of hatred and loss swept through her, annoyance prickling along her skin and sorrow making her stomach feel hollow.

She swallowed it back – she had no right to feel that way – and reluctantly, silently, fell into step beside Neville as Hermione walked along in front with Ron and Harry.

"I wanted to speak to you all day," Neville said quietly, walking close beside Luna. "I missed you."

Luna's insides squirmed with guilt, revulsion, and guilt caused by her revulsion. She knew that he meant it, and that he was trying to be sweet, and that the romantic honesty would have made most other girls flush with pleasure, but Luna...

Luna just found it pathetic.

She struggled for a reply. She never had been able to express out loud something she didn't feel, so she couldn't say she'd missed him too...

"It hasn't been 'all day' yet," she said, deciding to concentrate on his first statement.

"Felt like it."

The cliché of it made her feel sick and upset. Didn't he have any imagination? Couldn't he say something that wasn't stolen from the pages of a book, or the lyrics of a cheesy love song?

She looked up at him, at his puppy-dog brown eyes that were nothing compared to Hermione's; at his slightly protruding lower lip; at the thin, teenager's moustache that he hadn't yet learnt to shave. He reminded her, she realised, of a dabberblimp: a small, pathetic, squishy creature with no interesting features other than its sheer 'uncoolness' and its ability to desperately sucker onto the shells and rock formations it lived on.

"That's sweet of you," Luna said. "I have to go to the Ravenclaw table now," she added as they reached the Great Hall, for it was lunchtime.

Neville smiled and said, "bye," before Luna skipped off in the direction of the Ravenclaw table in the middle of the room, where she would sit quietly, eat slowly, and pretend to gaze out of the window while watching the back of a brown-haired girl's head.

* * *

A/N:

Okay, I hope you liked it.

Oh, and Dabberblimps are on the Harry Potter Wiki, but there's no description of them so I twisted them to my own needs.


End file.
